When the glory of the transcendent God is not addressed, our focus shifts to human behaviour, the cultivation of virtues and the extirpation of vices, the qualities of discipleship, and so on. Personal responsibility replaces personal response to God, and we become engrossed in our efforts to grow in holiness. Our primary concern becomes our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional well-being. When other Christians ask us if we are happy, we automatically respond in the affirmative or brush them off with a benevolent smile even if we are close to tears.
Obviously, there is something pokey and cramping about this inordinate
attention devoted to ourselves, the state of our souls, and the presence or
absence of happiness in our hearts. As Simon Tugwell notes, “One of the surest
ways to avoid being happy is to insist on being happy at all costs. The
religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and
maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad.”
Moralising surges to the fore in this unbalanced
spirituality. At the very outset, it presents a warped idea of the relationship
between God and humans. From her parents a child learns of a deity who strongly
disapproves of disobedience, hitting one’s brothers or sisters, and telling
lies. When the little one goes to school, she realises that God shares the
fussy concerns of her teachers. At church, she learns that God has another set
of priorities: she is told that he is displeased that the congregation is not
growing numerically, that irregular attendance is the norm, and that his
recurring fiscal demands are not being met.
When she reaches high school, she discovers that God’s
interests have expanded to an obsession with sex, drinking and drugs. After
twelve years of Christian indoctrination at home, school and church, the
teenager realises with resentment that God has been used as a sanction by all
those who have been responsible for her discipline – as when Mommy and Daddy,
at their wits’ end over her mischievous antics as a toddler, alluded to “the
eternal spanking”. Through this indoctrination, God is unwittingly associated
with fear in most young hearts.
Moralism, and its stepchild, legalism, pervert the character
of the Christian life. By the time young people enter college, they have often
abandoned God, church, and religion. If they perservere in religious practices,
their need to appease an arbitrary God turns Sunday worship into a
superstitious insurance policy designed to protect the believer against God’s
whims. When wounded people fail, as inevitably they must, they engage in denial
to protect themselves from punishment. The perfect image must be protected at
all costs.
We work hard to protect our collective image as well. When a
youth worker in a Midwestern town dared to confess to the staff one morning
that he struggled with pornography, he received his letter of termination that
afternoon.
Clearly, the God of our imagination is not worthy of trust,
adoration, praise, reverence, or gratitude. And yet, if we are unwilling to
address the issue of transcendence, that is the only deity we know.
The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam
of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam
of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and
exactly what he plans to do.
- Brennan Manning "Ruthless Trust" p79-81
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